Study Says Equality Eludes Most Women in Law Firms

Published: January 8, 1996

(Page 2 of 2)

But the commission report is less optimistic. In the private sector, it notes, very few lawyers -- 1 to 4 percent -- dare to take advantage of the "family friendly" policies adopted by most law firms in the last decade. Those who do often are tarred as not seriously committed to the law.

Even women who have demonstrated their commitment for a decade or more often face a combination of crude and subtle barriers to advancement, like the partner at a large national law firm whose commercial real estate client celebrated the success of a two-year leasing project she had directed by taking her male colleagues to a topless bar. Exclusion from male networks reinforces the belief that women are less effective as "rain makers," lawyers who can bring in business -- a belief used in turn to skew promotion evaluations against them, the commission found.

The gulf between visible progress and persistent bias is captured in studies of law schools in Chicago and Philadelphia that found classes in which women are effectively silenced by male students who heckle them as "femi-Nazis" and overwhelmingly male faculty who ignore them. One male professor in Chicago told students in a discussion of a Supreme Court opinion written by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor that it was written by a woman and "women always change their minds."

Estelle D. Rodgers, a commission member, said, "The status of women in the profession has changed surprisingly little in very important ways that affect people's real lives."

She recalled the testimony of a woman at the first commission hearings in 1988 who described going into labor at her top flight law firm in the middle of an important meeting with Japanese clients and making her presentation between contractions for fear of losing her credibility. Ms. Rodgers, now a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union in Washington, graduated from law school in 1973 and left a large private firm for public interest work after the birth of her first child in 1978.

Today's young female lawyers say that they are less willing to make extreme personal sacrifices to adapt to a work culture defined by and for white men, and that they expect employers to accommodate their life needs, the report says. But many are coming to a rude awakening.

In the commission's hearings last year a lawyer who was recently the first to give birth in a firm of 100 lawyers described how on her return from a brief, hard-won maternity leave she asked for more regular hours and instead was assigned to write all the litigation team's overnight and weekend motions.

"Once she said she needed more regular hours, a kind of baiting went on," recalled Mary Cranston, the commission's liaison representing large law firms, and herself a partner in San Francisco's Pillsbury, Madison & Sutro, long a leader in hiring and promoting women.

The good news, the report says, is that women are not giving up. Many who left law firms have formed their own, or gone to corporate law departments where they are gaining the authority to choose which outside lawyers will get company business.

"There's an old girls' network that's starting to develop," Miss Cranston said in a comment echoed across the country.

It is only by taking advantage of the power of their numbers in such ways, the report says, that women lawyers can permanently change the structure of the profession.

Graph: "A CLOSER LOOK: Women's Progress As Lawyers" shows findings of areport by an American Bar Association study. (Sources: American Bar Association; Colorado Bar Assocation and Colorado Women's Bar Assocation; The Assocation of the Bar of the City of New York)